Rework Ultrastrikes
Ultrastrikes and Bursters fill much of the same role. Bursters can knock off mods as well as damage resonators. Ultrastrikes can knock off mods too, but are more niche than bursters are. They are also not functioning properly, since a L1 ultrastrike can knock off almost as well as a L8.
I believe the ultrastrike should be reworked completely. It needs to fill a role that the burster doesn't already fill. Maybe an ultrastrike doesn't do damage, but doesn't provoke a portal counter-attack. Or maybe it reduces portal remote recharge ability by 50% for a few seconds.
Just give it SOMETHING to make it worth using over bursters, which are far more common and easy to obtain.
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Knives and swords fill much of the same role. You can cut a hole in something as well with a sword. Knives can cut through tape but are much shorter range than swords. They are also not functioning properly because a 1" blade cuts through packing tape just as well as an 8" knife.
I believe a knife should be reworked completely. It should do something a sword doesn't do, maybe set someone on fire. Just give it something over a sword.
Ultrastrikes primary purpose is to **** Mods. That's why they exist.
So does the burster. Also, a burster is about 20 times more common to pick up than an ultrastrike.
Turrets and Force Amps hit players when they attack a portal. We still have two different types of mods.
There's nothing wrong with Ultrastrikes except for their low drop rate.
Ultra strikes will easily **** mods or individual resonators. That's what it was designed for, and that's what it does. Use an ITO - mod on a portal if you want more ultra strikes and you will get several at a time if you glyph. Heck, if you glyph a normal portal you will still get them fairly regularly.
There isn't a need to change the Ultra Strike. Simply walk to the center of the portal, and fire a few, and watch the mods go pop, pop, pop, pop and then drop a few XMPs to finish off the portal instead of wasting a ton of XMPs to **** the portal and the sometimes stubborn mods.
Ultra Strikes work best when walking as well, since you can position the USX (Ultra Strike) in the correct location.
Ultra strikes are awesome. Used properly, you can **** off enemy mods without alerting them, then take down their portals faster than they can respond to recharge. Also, if you have somebody relentlessly fighting to keep a portal, you can pick off single resonators 1 by 1 using only 1 or 2 hits. Lastly, if you want to take down fields but leave them with control (e.g. to keep getting AP for hacking, or to make them keep crappy mods instead of good ones, etc.), you can make sure to leave certain resonators undamaged.
They're used way less than XMPs for sure, but they're definitely something I want to keep having.
You don't attack a lot of l7/8 portal with aegis if you think burster and ultrastrike are identical to remove mods 🤔
And us1 are nice to remove shields without any notifications ^^
Ultrastrikes are awesome as others have pointed out. They're far and away the most inventory space efficient and power cube efficient way of removing sticky mods from portals. They're also the fastest way of doing so thereby increasing the chance of knocking a portal over before it's recharged. Sure, I don't use them constantly, but I try and keep 150 8s in my inventory at all times for good reason!
Sometimes you want to do damage to one portal and not the nearby surrounding ones, at least not as much damage as you would with a burster, this might be more common in urban areas, ultrastrikes help with that. Ultrastrikes are like a scalpel, in some degrees.
Just to be clear I'm not saying "get rid of ultrastrikes", I am saying that they should have something about them that clearly distinguishes their utility beyond simply doing what a burster does a little bit differently.
I think adding some kind of utility to them, like my suggestion of reduced recharge ability, would be really cool to have a specific reason to use a US. Right now, you can plausibly get away with no US at all. If the US offered something that the burster can't do, then it would aid in the tactical choice to use one over the other.
If you have a set of high-level portals that are closeby and all heavily linked and protected with high level shields, turrets and force amps, then simply **** lots of L8 Bursters will not get you very far. You will have to spend a lot of bursters before the portals start to take damage (After the bursters succeeded to **** out the shield) and in the meantime you will have to use a lot of power cubes because of you hitting so many well protected portals at the same time, you will lose a lot of XM with every burster fired.
Ultra Strikes allow you to target the portals individually. removing the mods while not loosing a lot of XM. A handful of ultratrikes can save you spending hundreds of bursters and cubes.
"they should have something about them that clearly distinguishes their utility beyond simply doing what a burster does a little bit differently."
Little is an understatement. You're comparing a knife to a hand grenade, and now I wanna play Counter-Strike. Thanks man 🤣.
I would have said machine gun / sniper rifle.
Yes both shoots bullets but they don't have the same purpose
Something to counter FA & T could be cool, but I wouldn't want the Ultra-Strike to do that role outside of knocking mods off.
Ultra-Strikes need to be able to **** resonators still, they still remain one of the only methods of surgically removing specific resonators that have been campfired.